Int'l Speedway puts pedal to metal on sales transactions

NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: JOANIE WEXLER ON WIRELESS IN THE
ENTERPRISE
07/25/05
Today's focus: Int'l Speedway puts pedal to metal on sales
transactions

Dear networking.world@gmail.com,

In this issue:

* Motor sports sponsor wins with mesh
* Links related to Wireless in the Enterprise
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Int'l Speedway puts pedal to metal on sales
transactions

By Joanie Wexler

In the enterprise, early wireless mesh network deployments are
catching on in hard-to-wire environments. The flexibility mesh
affords to reconfigure a network infrastructure on the fly is an
important benefit.

A wireless mesh network is providing such agility to
International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which promotes more
than 100 motor sports events annually, including NASCAR's
Daytona 500. The purpose of installing mesh at the company's
dozen racetracks? To accelerate transactions at mobile sales
counters and to enable real-time inventory management.

Mobile trailers account for a good portion of the merchandising
locations, making it difficult to install fixed-network
connections for point-of-sale transactions, explains Phil
Martocci, ISC project manager. "If a trailer moves, we don't
have to dig up cable. We adjust an antenna."

A wireless mesh infrastructure is basically a network of 802.11
devices that communicate directly with one another without any
cabling between them and that support the inherent best-path
selection and fault-tolerant rerouting that Layer 3 routed
networks enjoy.

ISC has installed Strix Access/One indoor and outdoor mesh gear
in the administration buildings at its racetracks, in its
merchandising tents and in its trailers, which travel from event
to event loaded with souvenirs, apparel and other goods for
sale. Computers in each store communicate with a store server by
copper cabling; the server communicates wirelessly via the mesh
network to a Strix gateway in the administration building at the
track. Each track communicates via a terrestrial T-1 to ISC's
Daytona Beach, Fla., data center.

Until last February, the various merchandising venues used a mix
of manual point-of-sale systems, from cash drawers to dial-up
lines to cellular links, Martocci explains. Transaction times
were unpredictable and, sometimes, error prone in cases where
sales personnel hand-keyed prices into payment terminals.

Now the broadband capacity of the 802.11a backhaul network (54M
bit/sec maximum aggregate speed operating in the 5-GHz range)
has sped transaction times to less than five seconds - as fast
as personnel can bag an item and hand over a credit card slip
for the customer to sign, Martocci says.

He adds that this has alleviated sales losses by reducing
customer wait times. Bar code scanning and credit card swipes
are now used for all transactions.

From an inventory perspective, merchandise has a short shelf
life, because it is marketable only for a given event. "So we
wanted to know which individual stores had lots of inventory
left, which had none, and to move merchandise around so we could
sell as much as possible by an event's close," Martocci says.

To that end, store servers continually transfer inventory data
to the Daytona data center. Merchandise managers on site have
access to the inventory data from wireless laptops and drive
around in golf carts to redeploy merchandise in real time for
the most advantageous sales.

The inventory management approach is possible with the Strix
Access/One equipment, because it performs double-duty as access
point (accepting communications from client devices) and as
backbone wireless router nodes. Other types of mesh gear
function as backbone infrastructure nodes only.

Senior network engineer Michael Tanguay says ISC chose Strix
equipment for a couple of reasons. First, its products supported
802.11a, and a pre-deployment scan of the 2.4-GHz 802.11b/g
airwaves "indicated that they were saturated."

In addition, the Strix architecture supports full-duplex
transmissions. "There are two separate radios [involved in a
transmission]. One is listening while the other is relaying a
transmission to the next hop." Not all systems he evaluated
worked this way, Tanguay says.

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_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Joanie Wexler

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology
writer/editor in California's Silicon Valley who has spent most
of her career analyzing trends and news in the computer
networking industry. She welcomes your comments on the articles
published in this newsletter, as well as your ideas for future
article topics. Reach her at <mailto:joanie@jwexler.com>.
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